InterVideo
» see intervideo.com as it lived, on the wayback machine
~ the goodbye ~
InterVideo was set up in Fremont, California in 1998 by Chinn Chin along with Honda Shing, Rosemary Leng and Joe Monastiero. It existed to solve one licensing problem. Windows shipped without an MPEG-2 decoder, for patent reasons rather than technical ones, so a PC with a DVD drive could not play a DVD until somebody sold the manufacturer a player. Two companies filled that hole worldwide. One was CyberLink with PowerDVD and the other was InterVideo with WinDVD.
A computer bought in Turkey in the early 2000s arrived with one of the two on it, and which one you got depended entirely on who the vendor had a contract with. I had WinDVD on a machine for years without ever forming an opinion about it. It opened and played the disc. The remote-control skin took up half the screen.
The company listed on Nasdaq under IVII and had a genuinely good run on that one product. It also picked up the hard end of the format war, since WinDVD was among the first players to handle Blu-ray and HD DVD playback on a PC, back when a PC drive was one of the few ways to watch either format at all.
On 13 August 2005 InterVideo bought Ulead Systems, the Taiwanese company behind VideoStudio and PhotoImpact, for about 68 million dollars, with the formal merger following in July 2006. That made it a small video-software group rather than a single-product licensor, which is roughly the point at which it became worth buying.
~ the chronicle ~
| Born | 1998 in Fremont, California |
|---|---|
| Peak | WinDVD bundled by most major PC manufacturers, Nasdaq listing under IVII |
| Killed | 12 December 2006, acquisition by Corel completed |
| Lifespan | 8 years |
| Made by | Chinn Chin, Honda Shing, Rosemary Leng and Joe Monastiero |
| Killed by | Corel, which kept the product and dropped the company name |
~ why it was on your machine ~
Bundled software is a strange market, because the person using the product is not the person who chose it. InterVideo sold to the buyers at Dell and Toshiba and the rest of that list, at a price per seat low enough that no purchasing manager thought hard about it. Volume came from the fact that DVD drives went into essentially every desktop and laptop sold between 1999 and 2007.
That also describes the trap. The channel died with the hardware: laptops stopped having a slot in the side, and a bundled DVD player had nowhere left to be bundled.
~ the corel years ~
Corel announced the purchase on 28 August 2006 and completed it on 12 December for approximately 196 million dollars. The InterVideo name was dropped straight away and the products were reissued under Corel and Ulead branding. Corel spent that whole decade buying other people's software and shelving it into a catalog out of Ottawa.
The product outlasted the company by two decades. Bare intervideo.com does not answer at all now, but www.intervideo.com still throws a redirect to windvdpro.com, which is live in eight languages and selling Corel WinDVD Pro today. You can buy a DVD player for a computer that in all likelihood does not have a DVD drive.
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other software: GeoWorks Ensemble, Pixlr Editor, Turbo Pascal, Microsoft Equation Editor
also died in the 2000s: Clover Studio, Nokia Communicator, theGlobe.com
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